Researchers can now instantly view and search a list of contents in this vast collection, which consists of items ranging from posters, photographs, 16mm film, 1/2″ open reel video, and artworks – just to name a few – and gives rare insight into the career and personality of one of America’s most important avant-garde filmmakers. In addition, users with a Harvard ID and pin can access and listen to digitized audio recordings directly from the finding aid.

October 13th, 2009

The 7th annual Home Movie Day will be held at the HFA on Saturday October 17th.

Over the years we have seen a wide variety of films at Home Movie Day, from an amateur Tarzan re-enactment by kids in the 1930s to film taken on an oceanliner in the 1920s. Last year a teenage spy film hit the screen to great acclaim. Classic home movies of barbecues and family vacations are our bread and butter, and they never cease to surprise and delight the crowd.

Why home movies? Because these little films, yours, or your grandma’s, or the ones you found at the junkyard, are unique and personal, potentially interesting, funny, pretty, fascinating and strange, and certainly worth a watch. Be the star of the show!

We provide the screen, projectors, projectionists, film inspectors, music, and information about film preservation and home movies in general, you provide the films.

The films you bring can be new or old (but don’t bring films we’ve shown at Home Movie Days past), they can belong to you or someone else. They should be amateur (not mass-produced), but those are the only guidelines.

Free Event
Saturday October 17 at 1pm

Home Movie Day

Check in with your films at 11am
Films will screen 1-4pm
In room B-04 in the lower level of the Carpenter Center
24 Quincy Street, Cambridge

Bring out your home movies on super 8, 8mm, 16mm, VHS, DVD, or other video format (bring a player or camera). Video is limited to 5 minutes. Local film archivists will be on hand to discuss home movie preservation.

Each film must be inspected for damage before being run on a projector, so please drop off your film as early as you can. If possible, drop off your film at the HFA office the week prior to the event.

For more information about Home Movie Day and locations around the country, visit the Home Movie Day website, homemovieday.org.

October 8th, 2009

(notalgia) (Hollis Frampton, 1971)

The HFA recently posted a number of preserved audio recordings from the Hollis Frampton Collection on Harvard’s online catalog, HOLLIS.

Filmmaker, photographer, and critic Hollis Frampton’s collection came to the HFA in 2003. From original artworks to invaluable audio recordings, this collection gives rare insight into the career and personality of one of the most important American avant-garde filmmakers. The recently digitized recordings document Frampton giving lectures, answering audience questions and engaging in lively debates after screenings of his own work throughout the late 1960s and mid 1970s.

The collection is currently available for use on site at the HFA’s conservation center and at the Fine Arts Library’s reading room. An online finding aid is in progress and will be posted to OASIS in the coming months. In the meantime, the preserved audio recordings can be accessed online by members of the Harvard community, and the entire collection can be accessed on site by following our research inquiry steps outlined on the HFA website.

In this example , Frampton can be heard lecturing at the Carnegie Institute on January 21st, 1971 as part of the Independent Filmmaker Series. Frampton’s films Surface Tension, Artificial Light, Zorns Lemma and (nostalgia) are discussed during the lecture and the question and answer period that follows.

The fifteen digitized and preserved recordings represent only a portion of the 1/4″ reel to reel tapes and cassette tapes in the Hollis Frampton Collection at the Harvard Film Archive. The Frampton Collection also includes photographic and xerographic art works made by Frampton, videotapes of television interviews with and shows about the artist, writings on Frampton by various authors from numerous magazines and newspapers, photographic slides picturing Frampton, letters written to Frampton, and paper materials corresponding to exhibitions of the artist’s work and that of his friends.